And run it while on battery power. See [[Powertop]] for more information.

===Hard drive dilemma===

===Hard drive dilemma===

Revision as of 10:06, 15 August 2011

The IBM Thinkpad X31 is a wonderful little laptop which contains everything you need for your everyday work, and even some gaming, if you tweak things a little. The X31 is rock solid, light (3.7 lbs), and nowadays very cheap. The only drawback is the lack of internal optical drive.You can see the specs of the X31 on ThinkWiki, a wonderful resource with additional informations.

Installation

A basic Arch Linux installation will do just fine for about everything, so I won't talk about sound or other basic stuff. No custom kernel needed. However, you will need the following particular packages:

Hibernation

To hibernate using pm-utils (tested with kernel 2.6.37), you have to adjust some screws of the default setup. Doing this, hibernation works flawlessly. You have to setup pm-utils first. If it's working out of the box, don't read further.

Don't forget to install radeontool from the AUR, as it's needed to turn off the lcd backlight.

If your X31 freezes during hibernation or just reboots instead of resume, when you power on again, this might help you:

Rovclock

You can also overclock your graphic card. As far as I know, there is no real drawback, but you can play it safe and only use it while running a game or compiz or any application using your graphic card:

rovclock -c 220 -m 210

Use this command to get back to default settings:

rovclock -c 144 -m 144

If you want to enable it permanently, add the first command in xprofile.

If, on the contrary, you barely use your graphic card, you can lower both power usage and temperature slightly by underclocking your graphic card at boot by adding this command to xprofile:

rovclock -c 90 -m 100

Dual Screen

If you want to use an external screen for a presentation or as an extended desktop, you can use xrandr.
For an extended desktop, you should first add one line in your Template:Filename configuration file in the Template:Codeline area:

The numbers are the total rectangular resolution that you need to use. In this case, I'm using the internal 1024x768 screen and an external 1280x1024 screen on the right. The total resolution is 1024+1280=2304 pixels large and 1024>768=1024 pixels height.

Note that in 24 bits with this option, the performance is affected for 3D drawing, so you may need to comment it and use only one screen when you need the graphical power.

Then restart your X server. You can issue this command in a shell:

xrandr --output VGA-0 --right-of LVDS

To find the exact name of the monitors and the maximum resolution that you set up in the configuration file, you can type just Template:Codeline without arguments.

Powersaving

Laptop-mode

This will put your screen brightness to the minimum level when on battery and restore it to maximum when on ac power:

It will create scripts, executed by the laptop-mode daemon when switching the power source, that change the brightness of your screen using the thinkpad_acpi module.

Undervolting

The X31 CPUs can be undervolted, which means they will offer you the same performance, but with more battery life and a cooler laptop. From personal experience, my CPU temperature,during 100% activity, dropped by 15-20°C just by using this patch. This is extremely easy using the linux-phc patch, but only if you know the proper values to give the CPU. Informations on how to find them is available here or here. I know it can be hard to find your own values, so here is a table were you can indicate what are the good values for each of the X31 CPUs:

Pentium-m 1600MHz : 34 26 18 12 8 5

Warning: Your computer may freeze once a month because of those values. If you find more stable ones, please indicate them.

Modprobe

The three first lines put some of your devices in power-saving mode, respectively the USB ports, the wireless card and the sound card. Note that you need the last line in order to control your fan speed (see above).

download the neta504 driver for windows and unpack it (Be sure that you have unpacked the whole driver !) Then run :

# ndiswrapper -i /path/to/your/dir/netA504.inf

Save the ndiswrapper conf file :

# ndiswrapper -m
# ndiswrapper -ma
# ndiswrapper -mi

Now you can add to your kernel the module :

# modprobe ndiswrapper

and voilà ! I've tried this with wicd and it works flawlessly !

Audio keys

To have an on-screen Display for volume change or thinklight activation you can use Tpb: ThinkPad_OSD. The audio volume up/down keys will change audio volume independently from ALSA/OSS mixer. This works quite well, so try it out.